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Skills for a Left-Handed child

by Hannah
(Minneapolis, MN)

My 4 year-old son is left-handed and both his father and I are right handed. He's doing well in preschool in terms of learning fine motor skills, and we're also doing what we can at home to support his learning. Is there anything special we should keep in mind in terms of teaching a child to write, etc, left-handed?

Hannah

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Skills for a Left-Handed child

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Tips for a left-handed child
by: OT Mom

Hi Hannah!

It sounds as though your son is doing well as a left-hander, and well done for being so sensitive to his needs!

At this stage, the most important thing as far as fine motor development goes, is to make sure that he uses left handed scissors for scissor cutting tasks, and does not switch hands during gross motor or fine motor tasks. Also make sure that his teacher allows him to angle his paper to make his writing tasks easier.

It is not easy for left-handers to learn to form letters properly, as they tend to want to do them in the opposite direction to right-handers, and this often results in letter reversals. So make sure, even at this early age, that he forms the letters of his name as well as his numbers, correctly, and that he draws patterns etc from left to right to reinforce the habit of working from left to right.

www.lefthandnz.com is a great website for parents and teachers of left-handers, and offers good advice as well as left-handed resources. They also have materials that help left-handed children make their letter formations correctly, so check them out! (I don't get paid for this link, so there's no catch!)

Hope that helps!

Thank you for visiting this site!
Kind regards,
OT Mom

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